EdTech…a new classification of humanities within the liberal arts?

Today I was reading a blog post written for Inside Higher Ed. The post was short and gave no answers but asked some interesting questions. Here are two:

Will EdTech be an enabler for a post-secondary agenda that originates outside of the concerns, values, and goals of educators and learners? An agenda that stresses efficiency and privileges those outcomes that can be easily quantified?

Or will EdTech be a method to advance a vision of learning and teaching that insists on the primacy of relationships, people, and outcomes that may be less amenable to discrete measurement, sorting, and ranking?

The post goes on to ask if the Humanities will accept EdTech into their corner of the world. I began thinking about these questions and wondered what Avila University faculty, staff, and students thought about this. To help spur on comments, I have selected a definition of the humanities from Stanford’s Website. It reads as follows:

The humanities can be described as the study of how people process and document the human experience. Since humans have been able, we have used philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history and language to understand and record our world. These modes of expression have become some of the subjects that traditionally fall under the humanities umbrella. Knowledge of these records of human experience gives us the opportunity to feel a sense of connection to those who have come before us, as well as to our contemporaries. (http://shc.stanford.edu/what-are-the-humanities)

Please comment on the questions raised by Kim in his 2015 post and your thoughts in this post. I would love to read your opinions and learn from each of you.

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The Center for Transformational Learning is the Avila University center of excellence in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Its mission is provide resources and support to faculty, students, and staff in their pursuit of life long learning and transformational growth through self-directed learning.